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Talking To...Billy Bragg

But the band on the album isn't going out on the road with you.

They're just the most amazing musicians, Joe's regular guys, his crew, but they're LA-based session musicians, very busy and the attractions of turning up in Glasgow on a wet Wednesday are a bit lost on them. So, I've been really lucky and hooked up a great band, young guys.
The drummer, Luke Bullen, is one of Joe Strummer's old guys, and he recognised Jay Bellerose's playing on the record before he ever knew it was him. CJ Hillman plays the most incredible pedal steel guitar as well as mandolin, slide guitar and all this great stuff - he's in his own style but he can take what Greg Leisz plays on the record and augment it. There's Owen Parker on keys who can also do backing vocals. There aren't any backing vocals on the record but it will pay dividends when we go out and play older Billy Bragg songs. Matt Round plays upright bass like David Piltch on the record.
We got together in Glasgow and just spent a week playing the album so it's really bedded in. Then we introduced the Billy Bragg stuff and it's amazing to see what happens with some of those songs. There's definitely something of the spirit of Mermaid Avenue in these sessions and in the methods being employed. I put Ideology up on Facebook so people can see what we're up to. It's got this great big Byrds' sheen with the Rickenbacker guitar and it swings.
But just as interesting is the way I came to do it in the first place - bits of the lyric kept coming up on my Twitter feed. People were quoting it at each other, so it was like crowd sourcing and I started putting it back in the set and people were like: 'That's so now, man.'!

Did you have the songs before you went out to Pasadena to record with Joe?

I had some things leftover from the tail end of Mr Love and Justice. I could have gone there and done six songs then gone and done six more another time like I did with Mr Love and Justice. This record is definitely is related to songs from the second half of Mr Love and Justice - tracks like I Keep Faith, If You Ever Leave and You Make Me Brave.
That was where Goodbye Goodbye came from. I wrote that in Phill Jupitus' living room when he was doing the last of his radio shows from his house, but it wasn't really finished. It was going to go on the end of Mr Love and Justice, but when I put it on as track 13 and played it to people they said it either sounded like I was retiring or I was terminally ill.

So that was the bridge between the two records?

Kind of. I'd been playing I Ain't Got No Home, although a totally different arrangement, I had Goodbye Goodbye, Handyman Blues I wrote on the way to the airport. Joe sent me lyrics for Over You and Your Name On My Tongue and I had some bits of tunes. Swallow My Pride came on the way over and then we worked some other things up in the studio.

A song like Handyman Blues is ring true in a lot of homes. We'd all love to be able to do all the practical stuff.

Yeh, everyone says 'Oh it's a blokes' song', but when we played it in Glasgow I had a woman come up to me and say 'I see you've met my husband then!' So, it's not just guys it's the women that get that song as well.

That's very reassuring - as much as we'd all like to be good at that stuff and we don't want to admit we're not, it turns actually out our women love us anyway. For who we are.

That's it. It's that opening line: 'I'm never gonna be the handyman around the house my father was …' but that's OK because I can do this, I can make this work for us. That bloke you get round to hang the curtain rail or put the shelf up, ask him to write a song for you see what happens.
The one thing I do take on though, I have to make the rounds of the light bulbs at some point and that can take forever in this house because there are so many fittings and different types. I can't make Juliet do that, that's my job. I know it's time to do it when I notice the house is getting a bit gloomy, so I take an hour or so and make the rounds.
But my dad was that handyman, although he also loved reading, he always had books on the go so I inherited that creative side from him. My brother, on the other hand, inherited the practical side and like my dad he's got the seven-year saga of the never-ending extension on his hands. It's the bane of his life.

Do you have a never-ending song that won't write itself?

I have concepts and ideas and bits of songs that I never quite nail, there's definitely a parallel - maybe my brother's extension is a bit like that.
I'm always recycling ideas and tunes. I record ideas on my iPhone and then I get them back - like Handyman Blues came to me on the way to the airport to fly out to Joe's. I had this riff and a bit of lyric and then it all just clicked into place.
Every songwriter should have a woodshed that's full of stuff and mine is never quite as full of raw material as I think it is. I need a focus. I'm all right at starting things but not so good at finishing stuff so Joe when said come over and make a record just bring a few songs with you, there wasn't a massive amount to take over.
But it's not so much committing to making a record that gives me focus it's when I've agreed to pay for it. So I didn't tell my manager I was doing this, I didn't tell a record company, I told Juliet, but that was it. I didn't even take a guitar - I played Joe's acoustic - just had my phone, a few ideas and a change of underwear.
I slept in Joe's son's room, who was away at college and we made the record in the basement in five days just like he said we would.

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